The dissolution of the USSR was relatively bloodless. The Chechen wars were not. Between 1994 and 2009 two violent civil wars took place between Chechen separatist forces and Russian federal troops. By the end of this period, Moscow had been rocked by multiple terrorist attacks and Grozny was declared “the most destroyed city on earth.” While the Chechen wars were unique in some ways to the former USSR, they were also part of a more general “Global War on Terror” that pitted regular military forces from large, powerful countries such as the US and Russia against insurgents, frequently with Islamist ties. This created a new trend in war literature, one focused on the trauma and alienation of the GWOT combatants, who experienced the uncertainty of the asymmetrical battlefield in combat and then the difficulty of integrating with a largely ignorant and indifferent civilian populace once they returned home. This trend, Elena Pedigo Clark argues, is visible Russophone as well as Anglophone literature from this period. Clark's book examines works by four significant authors of literature about the Chechen wars through the lens of trauma theory. Using Kalí Tal’s concept of “the literature of trauma,” it focuses on works that were created in order to share the author’s personal experience of trauma with the world.
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